If It Isn't Banned, Foyle's Should Have It

FOYLE'S occupies a clutter of buildings on Charing Cross Road in London. It stocks about five million books, new and old, on 40 miles of shelves. On an average day it will be patronized by thousands of book lovers, who will mingle with numerous shoplifters, several hundred employes and one house detective. The scene, it has been said, is a perfect preview of the last stages of chaos.

Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall and former Prime Minister Harold Wilson are frequent customers. Noel Coward is said to have gotten the inspiration for “Cavalcade” while looking through a pile of magazines in Foyle's, and Jean Paul Getty buys up dozens of old guidebooks. Supposedly he likes to travel around the world discovering how places have changed since the books were published.

Not everyone walks out of Foyle's happy. The shop once received a letter from a customer complaining about “the time when I stood at the top of a mighty ladder in your classics department hobnobbing with a brace of bloated spiders and, having found the book I wanted, forgot that I was up a ladder and stepped down to a floor that was a mean dozen rungs below, thus arriving home with a winsome pair of bandy legs, which made me look as if I were astride an invisible and very wide horse.”

Foyle's replied immediately: “Dear Sir, We regret to learn that you fell from a ladder and hope that you did not hurt yourself. We have in stock a wide selection of books dealing with accident insurance in Department 13 where you would also find a work called ‘Accidents and Their Prevention’ (Cambridge University Press.).”

Foyle's began in 1904 when William Foyle, the son of a London grocer, failed his civil service examinations and finding himself with a lot of used textbooks, advertised them for sale, Struck by the number of replies he received, he decided to buy all the second‐hand books he could lay his hands on and resell them at a profit. Soon he was in business, first in his mother's kitchen, then in a smelly building on Charing Cross Road that had once been a canning factory.

Despite his early success, Foyle, a jovial, wing‐collared man who liked toy train sets, false noses and exploding cigars, was often in debt, and once he was narrowly saved from bankruptcy when, going through a pile of books at the Portobello Road Market, he found a first edition of “The Rubaiyat,” which he bought for tuppence and later sold for £2,000. “But then I've always been lucky,” he said. “I am the seventh child of a seventh child of a seventh child, which means I can always pick the winner of the Derby.”

Experts are supposed to examine each pile of books sold to Foyle's, but sometimes they overlook a rare volume, so customers can occasionally pick up prize. However, not all customers appreciate the value of what they purchase. One man bought an expensive prayer book and then discovered that several pages had been defaced by scribbling. He asked for his money back and Foyle's obliged. Then the book was sent to an autograph expert. The scribbling was identified as the writing of Ben Jonson.

When a collection of George Bernard Shaw's correspondence that had been sold to an American for $800 was found to be forged, the shop sent the letters to Shaw, who returned them with a note pointing out how the forged hand differed from his own. Foyle's then sold the phony letters along with Shaw's genuine one for $1,500.

As business developed, the owner became friends with many authors and passed on tales of their idiosyncrasies to his daughter, Christina, who inherited the shop when he died in 1963. Arnold Bennett, Foyle recalled, spent hours browsing in the store and always carried a £5 note in his pocket to present to the first person he found reading one of his books. He died without surrendering the bill.

Christina, too, has had her share of encounters with authors. One day a distinguished‐looking man with a domed forehead and an extremely courteous manner asked her to recommend a book for a long train journey. She suggested “The Forsyte Saga,” which had just been published in a single volume. A week later Christina received the book back with an inscription on the flyleaf: “You were quite right. Reading my own work made the journey pass pleasantly. John Galsworthy.”

Foyle's boasts that it stocks any book not banned in Britain, but finding the book one wants can be a problem. There are 32 separate departments, the books are uncatalogued, and many clerks do not speak English.

A number of customers prefer to write in for their requirements. The shop says its receives 30,000 letters a day, many of them from people in prison “with plehty of time for quiet study,” as one man jailed for embezzlement put it. Some of the letters take time, to decipher. One man requested a copy of “Harry's'Total.” Foyle's finally figured out that he wanted the works of Aristotle.

Christina also likes to tell the story of a Welsh farmer who requested a book on goats, since one of his was ill. He filled three pages with exact details of the illness, then added: “Don't bother after all. The animal has just

At Foyle's there is a constant demand for what the shop delicately refers to as “outspoken books” and others call pornographic. Some customers, shy about carrying such books openly, ask that a different jacket be put on them. The shop obliges. At the moment it is doing a roaring business with “Queen Victoria in the Highlands.”

—WILLA PETSCHEK

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A version of this archives appears in print on October 15, 1972, on Page XX3 of the New York edition with the headline: If It Isn't Banned, Foyle's Should Have It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe